Author: Reporter

Mammoth South Korean loudspeakers blaring BTS music. Large North Korean balloons carrying manure, cigarette butts and waste batteries. Small South Korean civilian leaflets slamming North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Day after day, the Cold War-style yet bizarre campaigns continue at the heavily fortified border of the rivals who have not had any serious talks for years. “At this point, both Koreas are trying to pressure and deter each other with politically symbolic actions,” Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said. “The problem is that neither side wants to be seen as backing down, and tensions...

South Korea’s military on June 10 said it had detected signs that North Korea is installing its own loudspeakers along their heavily armed border, a day after the South blared anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts over its speakers for the first time in years as the rivals engage in a Cold War-style psychological warfare. The South’s resumption of its loudspeaker broadcasts on June 9 was in retaliation for the North sending over 1,000 balloons filled with trash and manure over the last couple of weeks. North Korea has described its balloon campaign as a response to South Korean civilian groups using...

South Korean soldiers fired warning shots after North Korean troops briefly violated the tense border earlier this week, South Korea’s military said on June 11, as the rivals are embroiled in Cold War-style campaigns like balloon launches and propaganda broadcasts. Bloodshed and violent confrontations have occasionally occurred at the Koreas’ heavily fortified border, called the Demilitarized Zone. While the June 9 incident happened amid simmering tensions between the two Koreas, observers say it would not likely develop into another source of animosity as South Korea believes the North Koreans did not deliberately commit the border intrusion and North Korea...

The number of people of both Latino and Asian American or Pacific Islander heritage has more than doubled in the last 20 years yet it remains an often ignored demographic, researchers at UCLA said recently. The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute analyzed Census Bureau data within the last two decades. This included the 2000 census count as well as American Community Survey 5-year estimates on population characteristics from 2010 and 2022. Their analysis indicated people in the United States who identify as Latino and Asian American or Pacific Islander, or “AAPI Latinos,” rose from 350,000 to 886,000 in...

The federal government recently reclassified race and ethnicity groups in an effort to better capture the diversity of the United States, but some groups feel the changes miss the mark. Hmong, Armenian, Black Arab, and Brazilian communities in the U.S. say they are not represented accurately in the official numbers. While the revisions were widely applauded, these communities say the changes have created a tension between how the federal government classifies them versus how they identify themselves. The groups say money, political power, and even health could be at stake. Being lumped into the wrong column can mean a...